A good argument could be made that even radio stations are unable to have a large catalog of music playing on advertising revenues alone, but on the other hand most stations have quite large overheads from paying DJs and such.

Traditional radio pays real money for airplay.

Do they? I'm trying to look into the ASCAP/BMI royalty system and it doesn't give me a straight answer.

But let's do some quick napkin calculations:

There's about 10 000 commercial radio stations in the US. There are two main royalty payments organizations, BMI and ASCAP, which together claim to pay $1.5 billion annually to labels/artists, of which about 40% comes from radio airtime. Since not all radio stations play only music, let's assume on average one song is played per 10 minutes of airtime - I'd say this is somewhere in the ballpark. This would mean 525 million songs played in a year by commercial stations only.

525 million plays per year would amount to $1.14 per play to the rights holders. I don't know exactly how popular radio is in the US, but let's just throw something out there and say that on average there are 10 million listeners of radio in the US. Simply car radios account to a fair chunk of this. This would mean $0.000000114 per customer per play.

If this is "real money", then Spotify is paying more than well. Even at $0.004 per play they're paying over 30000 times the amount paid by commercial radio stations. This calculation is obviously very quick and dirty, but I doubt it's very far off the mark.

I'm sorry about the off topic discussion, I'm just trying to get the facts sorted out, both for myself and others.

EDIT:

OOPS . Grave miscalculation. I shouldn't have divided by the total amount of listeners, but with the average number of listeners per station. With the same 10 million average, it'd be 1000 listeners per station. This would mean compensation of $0.00114 per customer per song. Which is still almost 4 times less than Spotify as quoted earlier, but obviously now the uncertainties of napkin math come into play and might skew the number anywhere.

Still, it's fairly safe to say that at best radio pays similar amounts to Spotify.

Still, it's fairly safe to say that at best radio pays similar amounts to Spotify.

I have a friend who plays bass in a very successful band that almost everyone knows, and he griped on Facebook the other day that he still can't figure out how musicians are supposed to earn a living with services like Spotify. The guy earns a great living (not millions of dollars per year or anything, but certainly in the low/mid six-figure range) but the money comes from touring and actual album sales.

NPR had an interview with a musician a couple weeks back; he said that his 3-person band made about 27 cents for hundreds of plays on Pandora. I would guess payouts on Spotify are in the same ballpark.

I have a friend who plays bass in a very successful band that almost everyone knows, and he griped on Facebook the other day that he still can't figure out how musicians are supposed to earn a living with services like Spotify. The guy earns a great living (not millions of dollars per year or anything, but certainly in the low/mid six-figure range) but the money comes from touring and actual album sales.

I did some more calculations. The entire music industry in the US generates about $8.5 billion dollars annually (according to RIAA, ASCAP, BMI) in physical and digital sales plus royalty payments in radio and TV. Generating this amount of revenue from $10/month Spotify premium users would require 70 million users. While a lot, it's not entirely unimaginable.

At that price, the money should be there. Not getting much from streaming services like Spotify largely comes from the fact that it's still quite small - also the money is distributed "fairly" from the amount actually played instead of guesstimates or people buying albums they just play once. It's also possible that an ad-based model simply isn't viable enough (artists could not survive on the royalties from radio either), which is reflected by the fact that Spotify imposes limits on how much you can listen to music without paying.

NPR had an interview with a musician a couple weeks back; he said that his 3-person band made about 27 cents for hundreds of plays on Pandora. I would guess payouts on Spotify are in the same ballpark.

Out of curiosity what is the earliest Apple has released something based on a stated date ? Every time there is a major OS release and the release is Summer or Fall, everyone gets in tizzy because whatever declared season is about to end, but surely enough Apple does release the product at the end and technically still in the time frame.

The question is when hasn't this happened ?

If the answer is never perhaps we should just take the date (not counting actual delays) to mean the precise end of the stated term. "November" is means November 28th-30th. "Summer" means September 18th-20th, etc.

NPR had an interview with a musician a couple weeks back; he said that his 3-person band made about 27 cents for hundreds of plays on Pandora. I would guess payouts on Spotify are in the same ballpark.

To those who have pludged, can you answer a question? Is it possible to play albums sequentially by one artist? For example, if I have only three albums by the Beatles, can I type in "Beatles" and have the three albums show up and play one after the other?

I ask this because most mobile music apps including the iPod app don't let you do this.

Yes, it is really really fast. Two things...I don't see album by artist view anymore. That's what I used and man does that suck if it's gone. However, you can new view all your cloud content even if it isn't on your computer. I've got tons of TV shows and movies in the cloud and can watch them without having to spend all day downloading them on my comp which is nice.

EDIT: It's there, just needed to click all artists at the top of the artist listing.

EDIT 2: I really like the way they've laid out the devices menu. No more little icons on the left. Nice and big icons from a drop down menu.

Fast, except scrolling in some views.Fonts are wrong, and the app just doesnt feel Mac-like (menus, switching views...). There's an odd window refresh behavior.Clicking on album view feels really weird, not iOS like at all. The background uses a color taken from the cover. Looks weird/bad.View options are limited and terrible. You can't set the album cover size!!!

No feelings about it really, yet, but one thing I can't figure out how to change and hope I can: I'd like podcasts to list oldest episodes first, rather than the newest-to-oldest that it's defaulting to. Any ideas on how to flip that?

EDIT: Figured out an acceptable solution. At the top of the window is an "Unplayed / Podcasts / List" set of buttons. "List" is pretty much the same as the old view, which is fine with me.

I think I'll wait for reviews before installing. Not that I love the current version, I'd like to know the features that are gone.What about visualizers? I love the "jelly" one in particular, which is why I use iTunes in 32 bit mode.

In song view, there is no more coverflow, just the songs, no artwork whatsoever. In album view, you only have the grid view.It sorts the albums by artist, but within an artist, the albums are ordered alphabetically instead of by year. In the view options you can choose the sorting, not the view though. (song view still has the "album by artist/year" option to sort luckily) The display of the current song is now a miniature one, no longer the resizable artwork in the left bottom corner. By default, the sidebar is no longer visible.

I am trying to find positives in the changes, but other than the view if you open an album, I can't find any. I don't use match or the cloud, so I won't comment on that, but the view options are much more limited (they are basically gone) and the defaults that are chosen are choices that I, as a music lover, cannot understand.

I hope some options come back or I'll have to find another front end to iTunes. (or move exclusively to album view) I'm disappointed by this release so far.

CC

PS 64bit version of iTunes and it does have a visualizer called jelly. It's a caleidoscope type thing.